About Me

Friday, 6 March 2015

Taste The Difference

The flapping
and squawking over election TV debates between the leaders of parties is of
little interest.

The last party
political broadcast we attempted to watch was by George Brown, the excitable,
often tired and emotional senior Labour man, I think in 1970. Enough was enough. The news bulletin snatches etc. tell us we
have not missed much.

As a way to
make any judgement about the persons, policies or their abilities to do the job
it is a very bad one, a lot less reliable than buying an expensive device from
a cold caller or door knocker.

There are
times when it is good to know you are not alone and indeed there are others out
there who have the same disquiet about what we do and how we do it in terms of
governance and all its ramifications.

This article by
Jenny Manson today in Open Democracy via the Camden New Journal on "What's
Wrong With HMRC" explains in a terse and direct short item why so much is
going badly wrong. She cites the recent
work done by "Private Eye" in this field which for some time has been
trying to chart the murky waters of tax, government and associated business
interests.

In short it is
about the madness of the managerial fixations that have been applied across the
board in so many entities and organisations for which they are entirely wrong
and too often damaging and harmful.

A very different issue which may seem well removed from this is the
latest Joanna Blythman book on what is in our foods and how and why it is put
there. This article is a rather longer and fuller item which needs reading
through, especially if you might have a wind problem.

We have the
book and on the cover flap it says:

Quote:

The paramount
goal of the modern food processing industry isn't giving us healthy life
sustaining food, but manufacturing lucrative products at the lowest possible
production cost, using every trick in the book. It is aided and abetted in this
mission by powerful supermarkets that have more to gain from selling us complex
multi-ingredient foods than honest to goodness whole foods.

Unquote.

Joanna sticks
to her quality of food brief and gives sources. But there are other drivers in this
business. There is the globalisation of
food supply and trade; sharply rising population and above all the creation of
mega financial companies who own and run the show.

For the UK and
a number of European countries we have major deficits between home demand and
supply of food which entail a reliance on foreign and other sources. The USA may soon follow. What that might do to pricing is an
interesting question.

How these
companies etc. are run is now what matters, not what they are run for. What defines what is important is financial
performance, profit and funding other monetary related activity, which may or
may not have much to do with food.

In the present
election campaign there is a lot of debate and taking up positions on tax and
the spending that is being promised so easily and freely. But the question of food supply, the problems
pending in the future and how it is run are all ignored.

We could soon
find that leaving it to the managers and money men and their ideas about what
they are for will leave us both hungry and broke and there will be little tax
to be had to do anything.